Delay confirmed; IE8 will ship in 2009

As suspected, IE8 will not be shipping by the end of the year. The IE8 team is …

Microsoft officially set the deadline for the final version of Internet Explorer for the end of 2008, and never gave details beyond that. We noted in September that, according to the IE8 Beta 2 support page, prerelease versions of IE8 would no longer be supported come November 1, 2008. Earlier this week I noticed that that date had changed to December 31, 2008 and speculated that the final release of IE8 wouldn't be on time. My suspicions have been confirmed: IE8 has been delayed. The IE blog has given insight on the team's plans, but still hasn't given a concrete date:

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a "release candidate") indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done.

Microsoft's goal is to use the IE8 release candidate as a final test case: the company will be asking the public to test their sites and services with the build. Only feedback on critical issues will be considered before the final version is released. We'll keep you posted for when the RC build arrives. I'm perfectly fine with more testing and bug fixing being done; does a delay bother you?